This is a common rebuttal but it seems to only make sense in a human timescale with assumptions of a lack of partitioning. The miners are very fast, but have t

This is a common rebuttal but it seems to only make sense in a human timescale with assumptions of a lack of partitioning. The miners are very fast, but have the same network as the rest of us for the most part. Disrupting that network renders the current system quite vulnerable to partitioning and if you can carefully partition the miners such that they're arguing among themselves, bitcoin effectively grinds to a halt and requires human intervention and negotiation to fix. This is a statement not intended to be damning criticism btw. The proper failure mode for a distributed ledger IS to fail as a quorum takes place. Ultimately, bitcoin exists so long as it is more profitable for it to exist than for it to be destroyed. This is the case for most distributed systems.